The National Interest - Enter ideology

Defining national interest during war is easy: to defeat the enemy. Things
get harder after the war. Wilson discovered this; so did Harry Truman. In
each case the trouble was with the Allies, who during war agreed on the
primacy of victory but after victory had their own national interests to
pursue.

The interests of the Soviet Union after World War II entailed control of
its East European neighbors. This was not what the United States had been
fighting for, and in denying democracy and self-determination, it
constituted an affront to American principles. Whether it constituted a
challenge to the American national interest was a separate question.
Franklin Roosevelt gave signs of thinking it did not, at least not
seriously; Harry Truman, upon succeeding Roosevelt, thought it did.

More precisely, what Truman and his Cold War cabinet considered the
challenge to the national interest was the aggressive expansionism they
perceived to be inherent in Soviet communist ideology, and which was
currently manifested in the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Had
Truman and his advisers been convinced the Kremlin had no designs west of
the Elbe River, they would have slept more soundly and planned less
ambitiously for the future of Western Europe; but instead they chose to
interpret trouble in Iran, Greece, and Turkey as leading indicators of
trouble farther west. In the March 1947 speech that unveiled the Truman
Doctrine, the president described the world as divided between
"alternative ways of life," with the communist way
attempting to subvert and destroy the democratic way. By Truman's
reasoning, the fate of America hung on the fate of Greece and the other
countries under threat; it followed that the American national interest
required defending Greece and those other countries.

Congress, and apparently the American people, endorsed Truman's
definition of the national interest. Truman got the $400 million he
requested for Greece and Turkey. Then he got the several billions he
requested for aid to Europe. He got the Senate to accept the North
Atlantic Treaty, committing the United States to the defense of Western
Europe. And although he did not ask for a formal declaration of war, he
got the Congress to underwrite his decision to defend South Korea against
North Korea when war broke out on that divided peninsula in 1950.

Never in American history had the national interest been redefined so
radically and swiftly. Scarcely a decade before, Congress had forsworn the
use of force even to defend American ships and citizens against direct
attack. Now, the United States was pledged to defend half the world and
was actively fighting in a small and intrinsically unimportant country
half a world away.

Why the change? Two reasons. First, although World War I had suggested
that any major European conflict would eventually embroil the United
States, Americans required World War II for the lesson to stick. In the
twentieth century, American peacetime connections to
Europe—business and financial connections primarily, but also
cultural and social connections—were so deep and pervasive that
Europe's troubles became America's troubles, and
Europe's wars became America's wars. The Cold War commitment
to Europe—through the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), especially—represented an effort to keep
America out of war by keeping Europe out of war.

The second reason for the radical redefining of the national interest was
simply that Americans
could.
Had the United States been Luxembourg, Americans never would have dreamed
of underwriting European reconstruction or defending South Korea. But
after 1945 the United States was the richest, most powerful country in the
history of the world. Rich people buy insurance policies the poor decline,
both because the rich have more to insure and because they can afford the
premiums. The ambitious policies undertaken by the Truman administration
represented a form of insurance—a way of keeping Americans richer
and more powerful than anyone else.